The best Steven Spielberg films, chosen by directors, critics and super-fans: ‘pure popcorn perfection’

From franchise hits to historical epics, joyous musicals to autobiographical family sagas: Steven Spielberg has done it all. As his latest sci-fi film Disclosure Day is released, film-makers, authors and Guardian critics reveal which of his movies means the most to them

Steven Spielberg is often described as the inventor of the “event movie” – or as the creator of our new age of IP supremacy, in which the genre property is more important than any above-the-title film star. But that isn’t quite it. He came of age in the American new wave era but in spirit belonged neither to that nor fully to Hollywood’s golden age studio system that preceded it.

In fact, he synthesised both into a directing style that was audacious and fluent. He availed himself of the subversiveness of the new wave, and yet was classically oriented, drawing upon his love of – and alienation from – the all-American suburb, making him the Edward Hopper or the Andrew Wyeth of the movies. Tellingly, it was François Truffaut, the most emollient and Hollywood-friendly of France’s Nouvelle Vague masters, whom Spielberg cast in a cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind .

Spielberg’s early achievement was to bring about an evolutionary sea change, reinvigorating pulp-popular themes and ideas and giving them a new maturity and mainstream box office credibility. The idea of a giant shark crazed with a vindictive taste for human flesh or dinosaurs busting out of an amusement park is something that Roger Corman or Ed Wood Jr might have made in two weeks with risible rubber creatures . In Jaws and Jurassic Park, Spielberg’s production values were state of the art. His digitally fabricated dinosaurs were gasp-inducingly real. So was his shark in Jaws, a compellingly villainous character – but we could not be permitted any more than a brief glimpse of the mechanical fake shark. Spielberg arrived at the inspired idea of making John Williams’s legendary two-note musical theme the shark: we then imagined the shark, felt the shark, and shivered with fear at the demonic thumping motor of that musical phrase.

Similarly, derring-do adventures in exotically imagined foreign locations for family audiences were once thought the domain of Saturday morning serials. Spielberg, in partnership with the franchise inventor George Lucas, made them the lifeblood and vital voltage of the movie theatre: they were serious propositions in a way they hadn’t been before.

He has an almost supernatural sense for what an audience is expecting and hoping for in each scene. Like an orchestra conductor, he knows how to bring in the chest-busting timpani of the audience’s gasp, cheer and applause.

In movies such as Lincoln, West Side Story, Bridge of Spies and War of the Worlds, he revived great ideas and great figures and brought to them a rapturous verve. He created one of the great battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan and also declined to stay in his lane by taking on racism in Amistad and The Color Purple.

In what is considered his masterpiece, Schindler’s List, he addressed the Holocaust with absolute seriousness and commitment, and set himself the task of trying to find a candle-flame of hope in the darkness.